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City-states and empires

"At the recent conference on The Future of Cities hosted by The Economist, Benjamin Barber of City University argued that nation states would become redundant, replaced by a global network of co-operating (and competing) cities. "Even under good leadership, states will become increasingly dysfunctional", he declared. And he explained that that this was because "we live in an interdependent world of global cross-border challenges":

global warming and climate change

terrorism and war - increasingly cross-border

global pandemics - public health is becoming a global concern

immigration

technology

For Barber, the problem is that nation states are not capable of tackling these global cross-border challenges. This is not caused by poor leadership, but the "inherent limitations"of territorial sovereignty. Barber sees a return of the "city-states" of medieval times, reinvented in 21st-century form. The future lies not with sovereign states, or even groupings of states such as the European Union, but with mega-cities."

Will it be replaced by a global network of mega-cities, as Benjamin Barber thinks? Will it be superseded by supranational groupings such as the EU, as Willem Buiter thinks? Or will we continue to muddle along with a mixture of all three? Read on here.

Frances, if you're short of inspiration of what to write about, would it be possible for you to write about when money is destroyed- when it is paid as taxes, or when a debt to a lending institution is repaid, or other?

I love that article. There is a certain truth in your words. Technically it's not an issue anymore and from a logistics perspective such an organization would be helpful. I think Los Angeles is a good example that already shows what you described. Such Areas can become too big and then maybe fall apart.

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